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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


Gnome

GNOME summaries: We have two weeks of summaries this week: December 1-8 and December 8-15. Both are written by Havoc Pennington, as usual.

Ht://Dig

Geoff Hutchison writes in again with an update from the ht://Dig project. Now that 3.1.4 has been released, focus is now on clearing up the remaining bugs and issues in 3.2.0b1. Serious discussion has been underway on the merits and implementation of a SQL backend for future development. Anyone with interesting examples of how a SQL-based website index could be used beyond ht://Dig (say in content management), should e-mail the htdig3@htdig.org developer mailing list.

KDE

Krash released. The KDE Project has released Krash - an unstable, beta version of the 2.0 desktop. It's not for the faint of heart, but more adventurous folks will probably want to jump on this chance to see what's coming.

KDE's documentation knocked. Technofile looked at KDE's documentation and found it wanting. "Defenders of open source software can't argue that help and documentation aren't important, so we're stuck with an embarrassment for the open source movement: In the case of KDE, at least, documentation and help seem to have been forgotten. It's as if explaining and documenting how software works is of no real importance."

Linux Standard Base

The GNU project might work with the Linux Standard Base - but only if they change the name. Richard Stallman, evidently, is now prepared to withhold cooperation in order to press the "GNU/Linux" claim. For now, a name change for the LSB does not appear to be in the works...

Midgard

Here is the Midgard Weekly Summary, courtesy of Henri Bergius.

Mozilla

The M12 release of Mozilla is "just around the corner." This release is regarded, at least by a number of the developers, as a true "alpha" release. Mozilla is getting there - almost to the point where casual users will want to start playing with it.

UdmSearch

UdmSearch is a search engine with similar functionality to the ht://Dig search engine. It already uses an SQL backend for storing data, originally MySQL but now supporting others (at least to some degree) such as PostgreSQL, Solid, and iODBC.

Kir Kolyshkin sent us this description of the project, along with an invitation for people to check them out and contribute if they are interested. "UdmSearch is an advanced search engine developed primarily on FreeBSD and Linux platforms, but we try to do it platform-independent, so people use it on Sun, BSDI etc. UdmSearch has a number of advanced features (http://, ftp://, file:// and even news:// URLs are supported, various kinds of i18n (the thing that don't bother US/Canadian/English users, but is great problem for others), templates, stop-lists, robots.txt, ispell dict files support to search for different word forms (any language supported by ispell), it's completely reenterant (you can reindex pages and search at the same time - the biggest ht://Dig problem) and it's still fast)."

Wine

The latest Wine Weekly News is from December 13. Check it out to see the latest improvements, and to get the details of the local C/C++ war - which looks awfully similar to such battles in other projects...

Zope

Zope 2.1.1 released. Here is the announcement for Zope 2.1.1, a bugfix release.

Zope and Mozilla join forces. Digital Creations has announced a joint initiative with Mozilla.org. The initiative involves joint development in a number of areas, so that Zope can make best use of the features present in the Mozilla browser. Some specifics can be found in the Zope Mozilla Initiative Vision Document.

Here's this week's Zope Weekly News, courtesy of Mike Pelletier.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


December 16, 1999


Project Links
EmbedLinux.net
EMLAB
linux-embedded.com
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
PHP
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

   

 

Development tools


Java

More information on the Sun/Blackdown misunderstanding. Unfortunately just too late for last week's edition, Kevin Hendricks was kind enough to send us this note with his feedback on the recent press snafu/debacle with Sun and Inprise. It refutes Sun's claims that the problems have been worked out and also announces his resignation from the Java-Linux porting effort.
"I have resigned from the Java-Linux porting effort. In my "real life", I am a tenured business school prof. The only reasons I was involved in the JDK project at all were to learn something, to give back to Linux community something for all of the benefit I have received, and for fun.

Well it just stopped being fun and there are other ways to give back to the community so on other projects."

Kevin's note contains a lot of useful feedback on the situation. He mentions that he is actually happy to see Sun increase its involvement in the process but then catalogs what has made him unhappy about the process, including, "Sun never told us of this separate effort, never contributed any bug fixes they (Sun/Imprise) found back to us." He goes on to give a list of ideas of how Sun and Inprise can fix things, including these two essential items:

  • 2. Merge the damn trees together asap and get everyone working together to improve a single CVS tree (and not waste time with duplicative efforts).

  • 4. Open the process to get more bug fixes and things moving back and forth between Sun, Imprise, Blackdown (cross-over the two mailing lists if need be).

Discussion continues on the Java lists on how to deal with the problem, and what Blackdown's future role will be - if any. There is a vocal contingent that places part of the blame at Blackdown's feet for not having responded to Inprise's inquiries. There is far from a consensus on this point of view, however. Meanwhile, Blackdown still has not seen the source from Inprise's work - a necessary step if the developments are to come back together. Stay tuned.

Perl

...mostly used years ago in early website construction... Perl hackers were amused by this CNBC article about the runup in the stock price of Perle Systems (see also this week's commerce page). From that article:
There is further source of confusion in the name "Perle." PERL is a computer scripting language used in UNIX, mostly used years ago in early website construction before more sophisticated development tools and languages were developed. There is absolutely no connection between this programming language and Perle Systems.
It has been a strange week...

Python

Python.org redesign contest. The folks at Python.org have decided that it's time to redesign the web site - so they have launched a contest to see who can do the best job. The new site needs to be built with Zope, and needs to be submitted by February 21.

MetaKit released as open source. MetaKit is a database library with Python bindings; it has just been released under an X-like open source license. See the announcement for details.

Python Builder Developer 0.1 has been released. This is the first development release, not really intended for people to use yet. But they are hoping for other developers to jump in and help them out...

And here is this week's Dr. Dobbs Python-URL, by Gordon McMillan.

Tcl/Tk

Here is this week's Dr. Dobb's TCL-url, written by Jeffrey Hobbs.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

 
 

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